I told you so, Gordon Brown

Full coverage of UK PoliticsIt was all so predictable and, indeed, predicted. When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister, I blogged: "Commentators, for now, are in a state of vertiginous awe. But honeymoons don't last. Brown has been a popular Chancellor, because he has the qualities that people like in a finance minister: diligence, sobriety, gravity, puritanism. In a Prime Minister, these same qualities can come across as ponderousness, awkwardness, aridity and gloom. Best, surely, to cash in before the voters become restive."

Brown bottled it and now things can only get worse

Not that I can claim any special insight. Virtually every pundit agreed that, if Brown had any sense, he would go to the country at once. But, in the event, he was too pusillanimous to do it. And so, with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, the Fifeshire feartie was consumed by his one flaw. He let "I dare not" wait upon "I would" like the poor cat I'th'adage. He missed his chance.

As I wrote in that same piece last June: "Things Can Only Get Worse. For ten years, Labour has been squeezing the productive part of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented expansion of the unproductive part. Sooner or later, as always happens under a Labour Government, the money will run out. We may be reaching that moment now: taxes, inflation, interest rates and unemployment are all rising. And Gordon Brown, more than anyone else alive, knows how many further tax-rises are in the pipeline."